On May 13, 10:04 am, Kurt F <[email protected]> wrote: > I have been following this thread and honestly don´t think a computer > program can replace the human brain. > > It must be superstition to believe that any automated rules can relieve > anyone from a proper deep research. I completely agree: at least for the foreseeable future, a computer is never going to be able to do genealogical research by itself. But that's not where I'm trying to go with this discussion. What I want is a tool that a human researcher can use to help automate certain mundane tasks, to spot logical inconsistencies in our current views of how it fits together, perhaps to flag things that are unusual in case they are incorrect. It's a bit like saying a computer can't write an essay. Of course it can't. But it can help you spot spelling mistakes, repeated words, and sometimes certain grammatical mistakes. Richard

On May 13, 8:11 am, "Peter J. Seymour" <[email protected]> wrote: > That is why in the Gendatam system an event can be standalone or linked > to any number of people and/or evidence records and can have any number > of dates. Thanks for pointing out the Gendatam data model. That's a new one on me, and I'll definitely spend some time over the weekend reading up on it. > It is however in my experience rare for an event to be > assigned more than one possible date. I think it depends a bit on how you use it. Lots of sources -- censuses, gravestones, marriage certificates to give a few examples -- give the age of a person which allows you to infer the date of birth to within a year. But it's not uncommon, in my experience at least, for these ages to be wrong. Often it's unlikely that I'll find a precise date of birth, but it's convenient if programs can display an approximate date -- for example, so I can easily distinguish in a list of names between John Smith (b c1650) and John Smith (b c1800). Most software doesn't seem to do this automatically, so it's sometimes worth adding birth events for them. But if you do, then you have to deal with incompatible data. In the case of a birth, we know that a person is only born once, so the program can infer that if there are multiple birth events in the database, they must all be talking about the same real-world event. A program could come up with a good way of presenting the incompatibility -- perhaps by coming up with a range like "b c1810-12". But there are other events that are not guaranteed only to have happened once. Take a marriage, for example. If there are two separate marriage events between person A and person B, this could mean several things. Perhaps most likely, two reports of the same real-world event, maybe with incompatibilities due to errors in the sources. But perhaps the couple had two marriage ceremonies, maybe in different religious traditions if the couple were of mixed religions. Or perhaps the couple married, got divorced and remarried -- unlikely, but possible. So for marriages (and many other events), we need to be able to say whether we believe that two events in the database derived from different sources are describing the same real-world event. The Gentech data model copes with this. In the same way that personas can be grouped together to say "I believe these three sources are describing the same John Smith", we can use groups to say "I believe these three sources are describing the same marriage". > The links are scoped as > Gentech-style assertion records that help tie down probabilites. > However, I should point out that this sort of thing can get rather > complicated if it is pursued to its logical conclusion. Perhaps so, but I'd like to think that a program can hide a lot of the complexity from the user, except in those cases where it's important. Richard

On 05-11-2011 20:59, Bob Melson wrote: > Just as an aside, marriages and baptisms in "frontier America" frequently > depended on when the "circuit rider" made it to a place - might've been > months, maybe a year, not unusually years between visits. Those itinerant > preachers, together with the circuit judges were the glue that bound the > isolated clusters of settlements to the nation as a whole. Similarly, marriages and baptisms of French Catholics in eastern Ontario were sometimes done when a priest came across the river from Quebec. Even if you know where they lived and which Quebec church had that area, you still had to hope the priest didn't lose his notes, remembered to put them in the book, and copied them correctly. -- Wes Groleau There are two types of people in the world … http://Ideas.Lang-Learn.us/barrett?itemid=1157

Richard Smith wrote: > Suppose you have two statements > "The Dunny-on-the-Wold parish register says John Smith was baptised > there on 3 Jan 1800" and "John Smith's gravestone says he was born on > 5 Jan 1800". If you've identified the two John Smiths as the same > person, you might like your genealogy program to draw the apparent > contradiction to your attention. Perhaps you mis-transcribed one? > Perhaps one of the sources is simply wrong? Perhaps you were mistaken > in thinking the two sources refer to the same person. Either way, > perhaps worth a second look. I can live with the notion that there are alternative alleged dates for a given event and that the discrepancy is currently unresolvable. But that can be another area in which existing data models fail. If a single date is an attribute of the event object then the only solution is to have multiple event objects for the same actual event which is an unsatisfactory representation. The requirement is to be able to record multiple dates against a single event object, preferably with some means of recording the reliability. Or to have an object for the event /record/ with a single date but to have an object of a separate class to represent the underlying event to which the various record objects can be linked. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

Richard Smith wrote: > But the really simple applications are valuable too. For example, I'm > envisaging data entry for baptisms as a spreadsheet-like interface, > say with columns for date, name, sex, father and mother (though they'd > be configurable). (I certainly don't want one dialogue box per person > as most applications have!) Once you've transcribed them from the > parish register, it would be nifty if it could auto-group them into > families. Often there are lots of children that partition into very > obvious sets of siblings, and having the them automatically group > together allows you to focus on the less obvious ones. I do this sort of thing manually & can see the extent to which it could be automated. But it involves taking into consideration occupational & geographical factors. That brings us to another area where existing systems fail. Places are hierarchical. If one event is said to have occurred in the parish if Dunny-on-the-Wold it need not be inconsistent with its involving the same person whom another event places at the hamlet of Dunny Parva within the parish. What's more there are overlapping civil and ecclesiastical hierarchies and they will change with time. And then places described as "vil" or similar can be different in different contexts: if the main parish register says "vil" it will not mean the same thing as "vil" in a chapel of ease within the parish. This sort of subtlety isn't obvious to researchers living outside the area. In fact the large online providers generate a stream of complaints about quite gross errors. This, of course, provides a further opportunity because if a standard format could be devised such specialised knowledge could be encoded by local experts and re-used by remote researchers. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

On May 12, 7:49 pm, singhals <[email protected]> wrote: > Richard Smith wrote: > > Ian Goddard wrote: > >> Richard Smith wrote: > >>> RIF allows us to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then he > >>> or she was born within the previous year", but as genealogists we > >>> don't want rules like that.  Our rules are much more fuzzy.  We want > >>> to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then, in the absence of > >>> evidence to the contrary, he or she was probably born within the > >>> previous year". > > >> Hmm.  I think I'd go for something along the lines of "If the statement > >> that a person was baptised on some date is true then that person was > >> born on or before that date". > Other parts the posted suggestion can be misleading if you > have (as I did) four brothers (A B C and D) who each had a > son named A1-4 B1-4 C1-4 and D1-4; AND by some quirk, all > the boys named A were born within a 16 month period around > 1752 OS/NS, all those named B were born about 20-26 months > later, etc.  I needed the Will of the grandfather to sort > them out. I'm sorry, but I'm really not seeing what this example is supposed to illustrate. Yes, if you have four brothers called Tom, Dick, Harry and George, each of whom had, at similar times, four sons called Tom, Dick, Harry and George, then resolving it is going to be at best complicated, and perhaps impossible. But how is this to do with the suggestion that (effectively) baptism dates are normally a good proxy for birth dates? I think I must be missing the point of your argument. Richard

On May 12, 7:49 pm, singhals <[email protected]> wrote: > > ...  Having a fuzzy rule to tell you that it's > > normal to be baptised as a baby, while accepting that baptisms at all > > ages do occur, helps a computer assist you in finding that record. > > It's NORMAL to be baptised as a baby IF and ONLY IF: > 1) the child and parents are Christians > 2) the parents belong to a branch of Christianity that does > infant baptisms. > > Otherwise -- not normal.  Hindus, Moslems, Taoists, > Buddhists, and Confucians do not baptise at all. Most Jewish > branches do not baptise. Baptists, Methodists, Disciples, > and a fistful of other denominations insist on "adult" > baptisms (with varying definitions of adult). My point is that fuzzy rules *such as* these are useful, not that these specific rules are of universal applicability. In England, certainly until a hundred years ago, it was normal to be baptised as a baby. Yes, there were plenty of religious groups that did not do so, but in England at that time, it was not normal to be a member of one of those religions. In another country, or if the family you're researching is predominately of a minority religion, then a different set of fuzzy rules will apply. Maybe instead you need a fuzzy rule saying that a child is probably 12-14 for their Bar Mitzvah. The point is that for any given culture (whether national, religious or local) there are certain norms that, whilst not exclusively kept to, are a useful guideline. Richard

Richard Smith wrote: > Ian Goddard wrote: >> Richard Smith wrote: >>> RIF allows us to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then he >>> or she was born within the previous year", but as genealogists we >>> don't want rules like that. Our rules are much more fuzzy. We want >>> to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then, in the absence of >>> evidence to the contrary, he or she was probably born within the >>> previous year". >> Hmm. I think I'd go for something along the lines of "If the statement >> that a person was baptised on some date is true then that person was >> born on or before that date". > > You are, of course, quite right. But what you've given is an example > of an absolute rule. They're useful, but in a different way to the > more fuzzy rule I outlined. Your rule is useful because it allows the > system to flag clear contradictions. Suppose you have two statements > "The Dunny-on-the-Wold :) > parish register says John Smith was baptised > there on 3 Jan 1800" and "John Smith's gravestone says he was born on > 5 Jan 1800". If you've identified the two John Smiths as the same > person, you might like your genealogy program to draw the apparent > contradiction to your attention. Perhaps you mis-transcribed one? > Perhaps one of the sources is simply wrong? Perhaps you were mistaken > in thinking the two sources refer to the same person. Either way, > perhaps worth a second look. > > The point of fuzzy rules is rather different. Supposed you've found > baptisms for a John Smith on 3 Jan 1800 and on 21 Oct 1812, and in the > 1851 census there's a John Smith, aged 50. If we believe everything > here is accurate, then either the three records refer to different > people, or the John Smith in the census was the one baptised in 1812 > and he was 11-12 when baptised. But actually, all else being equal, > I'd say it's more likely that if the man in the census is the same as > one of the baptisms, it's the earlier one, and the age in the census > is simply a year out. Having a fuzzy rule to tell you that it's > normal to be baptised as a baby, while accepting that baptisms at all > ages do occur, helps a computer assist you in finding that record. In the example which I quoted it's fortunate that the PR also includes dates of birth so the situation is clear. But what if it only had the baptismal dates? Your fuzzy rule would tell us that all 5 children were born within a year. I can, however, see the utility. I frequently come across the situation where there are multiple branches of the same family, often with contemporary fathers of the same name, no mother's name given, and sometimes having children baptised with the same name. It would be very useful to have a program to generate the possible alternative sets of families. And in this neck of the woods it be even better to have it generate lists of children whose baptisms have been missed because the minimum number of families is greater than the number of candidate fathers. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

Richard Smith wrote: > Ian Goddard wrote: >> Richard Smith wrote: >>> RIF allows us to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then he >>> or she was born within the previous year", but as genealogists we >>> don't want rules like that. Our rules are much more fuzzy. We want >>> to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then, in the absence of >>> evidence to the contrary, he or she was probably born within the >>> previous year". >> >> Hmm. I think I'd go for something along the lines of "If the statement >> that a person was baptised on some date is true then that person was >> born on or before that date". > [snip] > ... Having a fuzzy rule to tell you that it's > normal to be baptised as a baby, while accepting that baptisms at all > ages do occur, helps a computer assist you in finding that record. It's NORMAL to be baptised as a baby IF and ONLY IF: 1) the child and parents are Christians 2) the parents belong to a branch of Christianity that does infant baptisms. Otherwise -- not normal. Hindus, Moslems, Taoists, Buddhists, and Confucians do not baptise at all. Most Jewish branches do not baptise. Baptists, Methodists, Disciples, and a fistful of other denominations insist on "adult" baptisms (with varying definitions of adult). Other parts the posted suggestion can be misleading if you have (as I did) four brothers (A B C and D) who each had a son named A1-4 B1-4 C1-4 and D1-4; AND by some quirk, all the boys named A were born within a 16 month period around 1752 OS/NS, all those named B were born about 20-26 months later, etc. I needed the Will of the grandfather to sort them out. Cheryl

Ian Goddard wrote: > In the example which I quoted it's fortunate that the PR also includes > dates of birth so the situation is clear.  But what if it only had the > baptismal dates?  Your fuzzy rule would tell us that all 5 children were > born within a year. No, the rule was that "If a person was baptised on some date, then, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, he or she was probably born within the previous year", so we'd infer that all 5 children were *probably* born within a year. However, you'd probably have another similar fuzzy rule saying something like "Within any one year period, a woman probably gives birth to no more than two children." Again, exceptions are possible (triplets; twins and a single child in rapid succession), but they're not common. But in any good reasoning system like this, these fuzzy rules would be configurable. So if you were researching a family in a culture where it is common practice to baptise many children together, you'd be able to disable the rule, or tweak it to suit the situation. > I can, however, see the utility.  I frequently come across the situation > where there are multiple branches of the same family, often with > contemporary fathers of the same name, no mother's name given, and > sometimes having children baptised with the same name.  It would be very > useful to have a program to generate the possible alternative sets of > families. Yes, that's exactly the type of application I have in mind. Another is spotting when new evidence changes existing theories. Sometimes finding a new baptism is enough to rethink whether some distant cousin is one family or two, and changing that can have knock-on effects elsewhere as you have to rethink how the branches fit together and allocate marriages and burials to them. > And in this neck of the woods it be even better to have it > generate lists of children whose baptisms have been missed because the > minimum number of families is greater than the number of candidate fathers. Again, a good idea, and something that a computer is ideally suited to. But the really simple applications are valuable too. For example, I'm envisaging data entry for baptisms as a spreadsheet-like interface, say with columns for date, name, sex, father and mother (though they'd be configurable). (I certainly don't want one dialogue box per person as most applications have!) Once you've transcribed them from the parish register, it would be nifty if it could auto-group them into families. Often there are lots of children that partition into very obvious sets of siblings, and having the them automatically group together allows you to focus on the less obvious ones. We'll never get to a stage where the whole reasoning process is automated -- and where would the fun be if we did? -- but that's no reason not to allow a computer to automate the parts that can easily be automated. Richard

Ian Goddard wrote: > Richard Smith wrote: > > RIF allows us to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then he > > or she was born within the previous year", but as genealogists we > > don't want rules like that.  Our rules are much more fuzzy.  We want > > to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then, in the absence of > > evidence to the contrary, he or she was probably born within the > > previous year". > > Hmm.  I think I'd go for something along the lines of "If the statement > that a person was baptised on some date is true then that person was > born on or before that date". You are, of course, quite right. But what you've given is an example of an absolute rule. They're useful, but in a different way to the more fuzzy rule I outlined. Your rule is useful because it allows the system to flag clear contradictions. Suppose you have two statements "The Dunny-on-the-Wold parish register says John Smith was baptised there on 3 Jan 1800" and "John Smith's gravestone says he was born on 5 Jan 1800". If you've identified the two John Smiths as the same person, you might like your genealogy program to draw the apparent contradiction to your attention. Perhaps you mis-transcribed one? Perhaps one of the sources is simply wrong? Perhaps you were mistaken in thinking the two sources refer to the same person. Either way, perhaps worth a second look. The point of fuzzy rules is rather different. Supposed you've found baptisms for a John Smith on 3 Jan 1800 and on 21 Oct 1812, and in the 1851 census there's a John Smith, aged 50. If we believe everything here is accurate, then either the three records refer to different people, or the John Smith in the census was the one baptised in 1812 and he was 11-12 when baptised. But actually, all else being equal, I'd say it's more likely that if the man in the census is the same as one of the baptisms, it's the earlier one, and the age in the census is simply a year out. Having a fuzzy rule to tell you that it's normal to be baptised as a baby, while accepting that baptisms at all ages do occur, helps a computer assist you in finding that record. Richard

Am 11.05.2011 23:13, schrieb Richard Smith: > On May 11, 8:00 pm, Kay Wischkony <[email protected]> wrote: > >> When reading your specs, I was reminded of two IT-terms: >> "knowledge representation" and "fuzzy logic". When looking >> for existing software I would consider these to be more >> important than genealogy as mere application domain. > > I completely agree. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much in > the way of existing technology (or even research papers that I've > noticed) that put the two together. > > There are certainly lots of technologies that tick the "knowledge > representation" box, and I have in past considered trying to build a > genealogy framework on top of the W3 semantic web stack (RDF, OWL, > SPARQL, RIF), but each time I look at it, I find myself put off by the > lack of a decent reasoning engine You are much more into this, so I will just add some brainstorming from far away memories: - <http://www.google.de/search?q=fuzzy+inference> looks interesting to me - My gut feeling is, the sematic web by concept contradicts the idea "fuzzy" HTH K W

Richard Smith wrote: > RIF allows us to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then he > or she was born within the previous year", but as genealogists we > don't want rules like that. Our rules are much more fuzzy. We want > to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then, in the absence of > evidence to the contrary, he or she was probably born within the > previous year". Hmm. I think I'd go for something along the lines of "If the statement that a person was baptised on some date is true then that person was born on or before that date". Apart from adult baptisms (not only as practiced by Baptists but also Quakers being baptised into the CofE) there are instances such as Benjamin Hutchinson who was baptised on his fifth birthday on 22/09/1844 at Almondbury along with two older and two younger siblings! -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

Richard Smith wrote: > The Gentech data model seems a pretty good starting point, to me. I think I'd like to see that revisited with OO in mind. For instance there are a lot of different naming systems (including some which evolved out of others such as descriptive, patronymic or topographical epithets evolving into surnames in medieval England). You could then specify an attribute as a base class of "Name" but in any given case it would be instantiated as a sub-class appropriate to the naming system in use. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

Am 11.05.2011 17:52, schrieb Richard Smith: > I've spent years looking for decent genealogy software that suits my > needs, and I'm almost at the stage of giving up and writing my own. > However, before I do that, I thought I'd ask on this newsgroup whether > anyone has any suggestions of suitable software. > [Detailed specifications] Hello Richard! When reading your specs, I was reminded of two IT-terms: "knowledge representation" and "fuzzy logic". When looking for existing software I would consider these to be more important than genealogy as mere application domain. Whatever you may find, I am interested in the results :-) regards, Kay

On Wednesday 11 May 2011 16:07, Ian Goddard ([email protected]) opined: > Richard Smith wrote: >> RIF allows us to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then he >> or she was born within the previous year", but as genealogists we >> don't want rules like that. Our rules are much more fuzzy. We want >> to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then, in the absence of >> evidence to the contrary, he or she was probably born within the >> previous year". > > Hmm. I think I'd go for something along the lines of "If the statement > that a person was baptised on some date is true then that person was > born on or before that date". > > Apart from adult baptisms (not only as practiced by Baptists but also > Quakers being baptised into the CofE) there are instances such as > Benjamin Hutchinson who was baptised on his fifth birthday on 22/09/1844 > at Almondbury along with two older and two younger siblings! Just as an aside, marriages and baptisms in "frontier America" frequently depended on when the "circuit rider" made it to a place - might've been months, maybe a year, not unusually years between visits. Those itinerant preachers, together with the circuit judges were the glue that bound the isolated clusters of settlements to the nation as a whole. Bob -- Robert G. Melson | Rio Grande MicroSolutions | El Paso, Texas ----- The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes -- Thomas Paine

Richard Smith wrote: > I've spent years looking for decent genealogy software that suits my > needs, and I'm almost at the stage of giving up and writing my own. > However, before I do that, I thought I'd ask on this newsgroup whether > anyone has any suggestions of suitable software. > > Most products I've tried are far too lineage-oriented. That's perhaps > okay for storing the results of my research, but that's not what I'm > after. I want something much more event-oriented that can store the > research itself. I want to record that I found John Smith on the 1881 > census, two plausible John Smiths on the 1851 census, and three > possible baptisms. I want to be able to record what the record says, > not what I think it probably means, including the different spellings > used in different sources. Although that seems a reasonable enough > requirement, a lot of products make it hard to use them like that. > Entering census data is often particularly tedious. > > If I only wanted to do that, I'd probably just use a spreadsheet. But > I also want an application that can let me say that I currently > believe the John Smith on the 1881 census is the same person as the > John Smith who was listed in the 1851 census on North Street, not the > one on South Street, and that I don't believe this person is the same > as any of the baptisms. And I'd like to be able to do this in a way > that's easy to change when new evidence comes to light. This seems > very hard in most of the products I've tried, and nigh-on impossible > for negative assertions like "the John Smith on the 1881 census was > not either of three baptisms found". I've also never found software > that can cope satisfactorily with relationships more complicated than > simple parent-child ones. For example, I would like to be able to say > "John was the grandson of Thomas, and probably the son of Thomas's son > Henry, though possibly an illegitimate son of Thomas's daughter > Sarah". That's certainly something that a computer program ought to > be able to handle in a structured fashion, but, again, I've never > found one that can. > > My second requirement is that the software runs on Linux and doesn't > require me to be connected to the Internet. (So a web-based program > is fine, but only if I can install it locally.) If it were open > source, that would be an added bonus, but it's not a requirement. My > only other requirement is that the program must be able to export its > database in some vaguely usable format and re-import it again. It's > probably best if it's not GEDCOM because I doubt GEDCOM will map > cleanly enough to the sort of concepts the program needs, but some XML > format (even if it's undocumented) would be perfect. > > I'm not aware of anything that comes close to this. Even without the > requirements that it runs on Linux and has an export format, I'm not > aware of anything, and that strikes me as surprising. Surely my first > requirement is just basic good practice? And whilst I'm sure that a > lot of research is not done to particularly good standards, surely > most software vendors must be familiar with what good research > entails? So I'm really hoping that someone will be able to point me > towards some really good piece of software that I've somehow > overlooked. > I think your requirements ought to be met by all genealogical S/W (give or take choice of platform). I doubt they're met by any. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

On May 11, 8:00 pm, Kay Wischkony <[email protected]> wrote: > When reading your specs, I was reminded of two IT-terms: > "knowledge representation" and "fuzzy logic". When looking > for existing software I would consider these to be more > important than genealogy as mere application domain. I completely agree. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of existing technology (or even research papers that I've noticed) that put the two together. There are certainly lots of technologies that tick the "knowledge representation" box, and I have in past considered trying to build a genealogy framework on top of the W3 semantic web stack (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, RIF), but each time I look at it, I find myself put off by the lack of a decent reasoning engine, the fact that RIF is still evolving, and the difficulty in talking about a statement without asserting that it's true. For example, "John Smith was born on 1 Jan 1900" is a statement, and easily representable in RDF, but in genealogy you frequently want to make statements about statements without saying that the statement under consideration is true. For example neither "The Jones family bible says 'John Smith was born on 1 Jan 1900'" nor "The statement 'John Smith was born on 1 Jan 1900' is probably false" imply "John Smith was born on 1 Jan 1900". The process of making statements about statements is called quotation, and is not well supported in most of the semantic web technologies, but it's essential in any fuzzy logic application where we need to deal with contradictory sources. The same black-and-white logic applies to the rules formats (such as RIF) used in the semantic web. RIF allows us to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then he or she was born within the previous year", but as genealogists we don't want rules like that. Our rules are much more fuzzy. We want to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, he or she was probably born within the previous year". Again, that's very hard, and maybe impossible, in the current generation semantic web technologies. That said, there are a lot clear parallels between the Gentech data model (GDM) and the semantic web technologies. The core part of the GDM is the assertion, and this is very similar indeed to an RDF statement, and it might be productive to think about expressing the GDM in terms of a suitable semantic web technology (probably OWL). I'll give some thought to whether I want to spend time doing that. Richard

On May 11, 5:44 pm, Ian Goddard <[email protected]> wrote: > I think your requirements ought to be met by all genealogical S/W (give > or take choice of platform).  I doubt they're met by any. Well, I'm pleased you don't think my requirements are unreasonable. I can't say I'm surprised that you don't think any existing software meets them, as that was the conclusion I was coming to, too. I see a lot of evenings writing code in my future :-/ The Gentech data model seems a pretty good starting point, to me. It's shame it seems to have spent the last decade languishing unloved and, so far as I can see, unimplemented. Maybe I'm about to discover why. Richard

I've spent years looking for decent genealogy software that suits my needs, and I'm almost at the stage of giving up and writing my own. However, before I do that, I thought I'd ask on this newsgroup whether anyone has any suggestions of suitable software. Most products I've tried are far too lineage-oriented. That's perhaps okay for storing the results of my research, but that's not what I'm after. I want something much more event-oriented that can store the research itself. I want to record that I found John Smith on the 1881 census, two plausible John Smiths on the 1851 census, and three possible baptisms. I want to be able to record what the record says, not what I think it probably means, including the different spellings used in different sources. Although that seems a reasonable enough requirement, a lot of products make it hard to use them like that. Entering census data is often particularly tedious. If I only wanted to do that, I'd probably just use a spreadsheet. But I also want an application that can let me say that I currently believe the John Smith on the 1881 census is the same person as the John Smith who was listed in the 1851 census on North Street, not the one on South Street, and that I don't believe this person is the same as any of the baptisms. And I'd like to be able to do this in a way that's easy to change when new evidence comes to light. This seems very hard in most of the products I've tried, and nigh-on impossible for negative assertions like "the John Smith on the 1881 census was not either of three baptisms found". I've also never found software that can cope satisfactorily with relationships more complicated than simple parent-child ones. For example, I would like to be able to say "John was the grandson of Thomas, and probably the son of Thomas's son Henry, though possibly an illegitimate son of Thomas's daughter Sarah". That's certainly something that a computer program ought to be able to handle in a structured fashion, but, again, I've never found one that can. My second requirement is that the software runs on Linux and doesn't require me to be connected to the Internet. (So a web-based program is fine, but only if I can install it locally.) If it were open source, that would be an added bonus, but it's not a requirement. My only other requirement is that the program must be able to export its database in some vaguely usable format and re-import it again. It's probably best if it's not GEDCOM because I doubt GEDCOM will map cleanly enough to the sort of concepts the program needs, but some XML format (even if it's undocumented) would be perfect. I'm not aware of anything that comes close to this. Even without the requirements that it runs on Linux and has an export format, I'm not aware of anything, and that strikes me as surprising. Surely my first requirement is just basic good practice? And whilst I'm sure that a lot of research is not done to particularly good standards, surely most software vendors must be familiar with what good research entails? So I'm really hoping that someone will be able to point me towards some really good piece of software that I've somehow overlooked. Any suggestions or comments gratefully received! Richard